The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity

In The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge described the most important breakthrough in our understanding of the brain in 400 years: the discovery that the brain can change its own structure and function in response to mental experience - what we call neuroplasticity. His revolutionary new book shows, for the first time, how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing really works. It describes natural, noninvasive avenues into the brain provided by the forms of energy around us.

Neuroplasticity: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Fifty years ago, neuroscientists thought that a mature brain was fixed like a fly in amber, unable to change. Today, we know that our brains and nervous systems change throughout our lifetimes. This concept of neuroplasticity has captured the imagination of a public eager for self-improvement - and has inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs who peddle dubious "brain training" games and apps. In this book, Moheb Costandi offers a concise and engaging overview of neuroplasticity for the general listener.

You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

A leading neuroplasticity researcher, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the structure and neuronal firing patterns of the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Personal Triumphs from the Frontiers of Brain Science

In this revolutionary look at the brain, best-selling author, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., introduces both the brilliant scientists championing this new science of neuroplasticity and the astonishing progress of the people whose lives they've transformed.

Introducing principles we can all use, as well as a riveting collection of case histories, The Brain That Changes Itself has "implications for all human beings, not to mention human culture, human learning and human history."

Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

Not long ago, it was thought that the brain you were born with was the brain you would die with, and that the brain cells you had at birth were the most you would ever possess. Your brain was thought to be hardwired to function in predetermined ways. It turns out that's not true. Your brain is not hardwired; it's "softwired" by experience. This book shows you how you can rewire parts of the brain to feel more positive about your life, remain calm during stressful times, and improve your social relationships.

An estimated five million Americans suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and live diminished lives in which they are compelled to obsess about something or to repeat a similar task over and over. Traditionally OCD has been treated with Prozac or similar drugs. The problem with medication, aside from its cost, is that 30 percent of people treated don't respond to it, and when the pills stop, the symptoms invariably return.

Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts

How does the brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state.

Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience

In the mid-20th century, Michael S. Gazzaniga made one of the great discoveries in the history of neuroscience: split-brain theory, the notion that the right and left hemispheres of the brain can act independently from each other and have different strengths.

The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live - and How You Can Change Them

Why are some people so quick to recover from a setback while others wallow in despair? Why are some people so highly attuned to others that they seem psychic, while other people put both feet in it over and over again? Why are some people always up and others always down? In this hotly anticipated book, award-winning, pioneering neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson answers these questions by offering an entirely new model of our emotions - their origins, their power, and their malleability.

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell and perceive time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables "mental time travel" - simulations of future and past events.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Why do we do the things we do? More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful, but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: He starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs and then hops back in time from there in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran is internationally renowned for uncovering answers to the deep and quirky questions of human nature that few scientists have dared to address. His bold insights about the brain are matched only by the stunning simplicity of his experiments - using such low-tech tools such as cotton swabs, glasses of water, and dime-store mirrors.

Evolve Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind

Joe Dispenza, DC, has spent decades studying the human mind-how it works, how it stores information, and why it perpetuates the same behavioral patterns over and over. In the acclaimed film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, he began to explain how the brain evolves - by learning new skills, developing the ability to concentrate in the midst of chaos, and even healing the body and the psyche. Evolve Your Brain presents this information in depth, while helping you take control of your mind.

Over the last 2,000 years, our understanding of how the human body works, why it works, and how to fix it when it stops working has come a long way. Much of this understanding has come on in great leaps in the last hundred or so years. Medical science and the more recent branches of medicine, like psychology, have all contributed to a whole new understanding of how our bodies work and the ways in which our internal organs function. Until recently, however, one organ and its functions remained elusive: the brain.

Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human

A scientist's exploration into the mysteries of the human mind. Neuroscience studies the brain, but what does science have to say about the mind? A full examination of what we mean by the term "mind" has traditionally been the province of philosophers, but what might neuroscience teach us about it? How does the mind differ from consciousness? And how do we know who we really are?

The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity

Modern times are stressful - and it's killing us. Unfortunately, we can't avoid the things that stress us out, but we can change how we respond to them. In this breakthrough book, a clinical psychologist and neuroscience expert offers an original approach to help listeners harness the power of positive emotions and overcome stress for good.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Emotions feel automatic to us; that's why scientists have long assumed that emotions are hardwired in the body or the brain. Today, however, the science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. This paradigm shift has far-reaching implications not only for psychology but also medicine, the legal system, airport security, child-rearing, and even meditation.

A groundbreaking investigation of the brain's hidden logic behind our strangest behaviors and of how conscious and unconscious systems interact in order to create our experience and preserve our sense of self.

The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

V. S. Ramachandran is at the forefront of his field - so much so that Richard Dawkins dubbed him the "Marco Polo of neuroscience". Now, in a major new work, Ramachandran sets his sights on the mystery of human uniqueness. Taking us to the frontiers of neurology, he reveals what baffling and extreme case studies can teach us about normal brain function and how it evolved.

Utilizing and effectively employing the power of your mind and brain are essential prerequisites for achieving anything great in life. However, when it comes to the development of their own mind power or brain power many people are clueless. They are not even aware that they possess the means of changing their brains' circuitry through neuroplasticity-based techniques.

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One

You are not doomed by your genes and hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life. A new science is emerging that empowers all human beings to create the reality they choose. In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, renowned author, speaker, researcher, and chiropractor Dr. Joe Dispenza combines the fields of quantum physics, neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology, and genetics to show you what is truly possible.

The Enlightened Brain: The Neuroscience of Awakening

There's been a major breakthrough in the world's oldest research experiment. For over 2,500 years, Buddhist meditators have investigated the human psyche. Now with the help of modern neuroscience, we have gained an unprecedented understanding of how the brain responds to meditation practice - which gives you powerful tools for changing your own brain for more happiness, love, and wisdom.

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

From everyday stress to severe trauma, many obstacles to a full life can be overcome by developing what Dr. Daniel J. Siegel calls "mindsight," our ability to perceive the mind and literally redirect the flow of energy and information within our brains. Through this powerful capacity for insight and empathy, we can "rewire" crucial connections, create dynamic linkages, and open ourselves to relationships in a new way.

Publisher's Summary

Conventional science has long held the position that 'the mind' is merely an illusion, a side effect of electrochemical activity in the physical brain. Now in paperback, Dr Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley's groundbreaking work, The Mind and the Brain, argues exactly the opposite: that the mind has a life of its own.

This is not a throwback to the old mind/matter dualism of Descartes, though it does decidedly (and, I believe healthfully and rightly) break with some of the tenets of hardcore behaviorism and inflexible functionalism. In short, the authors do view the brain as the seat of thought and emotion and all lower and higher cognitive functions, but they view the mind as something other than "byproduct of a dynamic, like the noise that is emitted by a lawnmower," as some radicals have asserted. Rather, the mind is a Gestalt, a whole greater than the sum of its biological parts, a living dynamic with "a life of its own": and that Gestalt is something special and real--the minds, the personalities, the psychic beings that we are.

I love this book because it's so mentally stimulating and so well written. The book covers a broad range of topics in it's quest to describe neuroplasticity. This book gives an in-depth account of how scientists discovered neuroplasticity, the current theories about how neuroplasticity can be used in treatment, the concept of neuroplasticity and its connection to quantum physics and Buddhist meditation practices, and more. I find this book really intriguing, exciting, and interesting, and I would highly recommend this book to anyone curious about neuroplasticity and the biology of changing bad habits.

Most of this book (the actual science) was very interesting, with a lot of valid and important ideas about neuroplasticity.

If you have OCD or know someone who has read the same author’s Brain Lock (which has much of the practical information without the metaphysics). This book is good. the narration excellent and there is a short PDF is available with diagrams of the parts and uses of the brain and nerve cells if you are not already familiar with these.

The book is largely conversational and easy to listen to, but from time to time drops into metaphysical discussions. The last third the book takes off to a somewhat unscientific path attempting to demonstrate that the soul must exists and connects to the body via quantum effects. Having such ideas is not inherently unscientific, but, to be science a clear hypothesis should be stated along with an experiment differentiating the cases. Here the book is quite weak. The logic seems to be 1) We don’t understand consciousness 2) We don’t understand quantum effects 3) Quantum theory has elements of consciousness and randomness 4) The author’s religion (Buddhism) supports the idea of a non-brain mind learning to control the brain. Thus) mindfulness must control the brain via quantum effects through randomness. Now I believe consciousness is a product of quantum effects (as is everything else) but that does not imply the mind is separate from the brain. The brain seems quite capable of changing itself and capable of all the practical aspects of OCD treatments without resorting to magic.

Would you consider the audio edition of The Mind and the Brain to be better than the print version?

Although this book is full of great material increasing non-brain-scientists knowledge about what can go wrong in the brain and why mental disorders are,in fact, physical disorders, the audio version is not good. It sounds like the computer voice on my Kindle.

What other book might you compare The Mind and the Brain to and why?

Sharon Begley has written a lot about brain/Mind science, and she is extremely good at articulating issues that might leave us scratching our heads. I have enjoyed her other works that cover nearby areas very much. The information in this book is so important for therapists to know. It really is the century of the brain, and if we don't understand why things go wrong we will never get better at treating them. The research is piling up day by day, but its not getting into therapist training programs or continuing Ed. This book explains in detail how a person develops OCD and would be useful for people with this diagnosis, and for family members trying to understand the constant checking and washing. In addition, his truly helpful information about mindfulness in therapy could benefit anyone. Learning how to manage our thinking (thinking about our thinking) may be the most important mental wellness thing we can do for ourselves. And why aren't we teaching Mindfulness Meditation to our children???

How did the narrator detract from the book?

Monotonous voice, flat affect and very little variation, really almost a computer-like reader.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Hmmmm. Fantastic Voyage II - Into the Brain. Tag line: This time, its about the neural networks!

Any additional comments?

So much amazing information for the public to educate themselves about Brain Disorders. This is a really important book. Too bad the reading detracts from it.

If you could sum up The Mind and the Brain in three words, what would they be?

Brilliant, thought provoking, a bit wafty

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

no

Any additional comments?

A wonderful book that will change the way you look at the world both inner and outer. It is heavy going at times and the writer sometimes seems to go on and on a bit, but overall I really loved it and have recommended it to my friends. If it gets a bit boring, stick with it because there are some really fabulous chapters.I love books that change me- this didI learnt a lot

If you could sum up The Mind and the Brain in three words, what would they be?

Mind body Spirit brain correlaries and the use of Intention and Attention to change intranced patterns and to creat altrnate results and states fof mind adn thus reality

What does Arthur Morey bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

I thought his reading was clear and insightful and well tempered

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

the last 1/4 Changing reality andinner and outer states thorugh the use of will and attention .

Any additional comments?

Excellent science but most of all the proof that we co create our reality and that reductionist materialism is aremnant of old non science.the practical uses of intentional focus and willful use of dynamics to create alternate results and reality.If you ar into the mind body spirit movement and or the brain sciences this gives you a great amount of ammo to prove that our intentions are powerful if we use various techniques.

The premise here is based on a very shaky link between quantum mechanics and the mind. It's an attempt to smuggle Cartesian dualism back into the world through the back door of physics. Most neuroscientists dismiss the quantum brain theory which boils down to the following claim: the mind is not produced by the brain but by quantum states. This borders on magic. Apart from the first couple of chapters on mindfulness and attention, which I found interesting, the author creates an argument that is a huge stretch. He delves into enormous and unnecessary detail, like an account of animal cruelty in a lab. I don't recommend this book. Another Audible book - The Ravenous Brain - does a great job debunking the quantum mind theory, and that's where I would direct other Audible clients.

If you have no 'agenda', i.e. if you are open, repeated reading or listening will reveal deeper meaning, greater significance. If you think not, do it then, just to prove you are right.

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Mind and the Brain?

The very long human history of retarding and destroying discoveries is objectively documented by many. Evidence in fascinating detail: "The Mind and the Brain" provides an insiders experience of a scientific revolution and the human causalities perpetrated by scholar denialism. One isn't required to have formulated a 'better' model before revealing the intellectual corruption of the existing one. Humans suffer and die when the various but small 'information mafia' succeed. This work points to objective data/findings from which rational and I would add, obvious arguments are made.

Have you listened to any of Arthur Morey’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Arthur Morey's delivery is most agreeable for me. In fact, the best I've experienced so far.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

The Scholars Holocaust

Any additional comments?

Do not permit any reviewer to pursuade you that this work has anything whatever to do with religion or your constructs of it. I would say, one who suggests so has (a) not read the book or (b) has made 'enemy' with what is, and conjured supporting attributes upon it.

Overview of the research of Michael Merzenich, Edward Taub, and Jeffrey M. Schwartz showing how the research can be applied to OCD, Turrets, and other brain disorders can be modified and eliminated with a four step process. There is also wonderful discourses comparing and relating the work to mindfulness practices from Buddhist meditation. I like the depth of theory, practice, and philosophy from the perspective of William James. Also and interesting weaving of supportive concepts from quantum mechanics with highlights from Henry Stapp. He also manages to show the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, entanglement, the uncertainty principle are related to free will and moral responsibility. Beautiful story with solid scientific principles trying to address the show how one can utilize mental effort or mental force to plastically modify ones brain to become free from compulsive actions and thoughts. It is one of my favorite texts. I see that few have the courage to under take such a broad field of study and explanations in an effort to help those who often have little hope or recourse to change their situation. Authur Morey does a splendid reading as usual.

A truly scintillating, intellect discourse on the case for Mind over Matter! A patient and articulate argument put forth with Clarity. Wonderful 'read!' Confirmation that the Mind runs the Show, and that the Brain is subject to the Mental Force (wow! What a phrase!) of the Mind! Awesome read! Proof positive that Success is an Inside Out Job!

Mervyn Barrett

1 of 3 people found this review helpful

Si

UK

3/4/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"In the end it doesn't go far enough"

The authors certainly do the groundwork for their proposition, most of the book is spent explaining (clearly and engagingly, admittedly) aspects of neurology and psychology that are not even cross-referenced with the authors' theory until over half way through the book.

The idea of conscious free will as mindful attention is as old as recorded history, present to some extent in almost all (if not all) religions, most obviously Buddhism, and spin-off writings of spiritualists and mystical teachers, Gurdjieff being IMO the best example (he is not mentioned in the book). The authors make an evidential and compelling link between attention and neural plasticity in the brain but this is as far as they take it. What exactly IS will if it is not, as the authors assert, just another brain function? Where did it come from and how did it evolve? I was left wondering if the authors had fallen into the religious trap of assuming humans are somehow special in the general natural scheme, as there is no mention of will existing outside of the human condition. If this is the case then will logically cannot be an external force as the authors claim. This contradiction is not resolved in the book.

0 of 1 people found this review helpful

Felix

LONDON, United Kingdom

10/9/14

Overall

Performance

Story

"food for thought.. inconclusive in its assertions"

Any additional comments?

I found this an interesting attempt to do away with materialism. Within is a hypothesis of a mechanism that attempts to establish both mind body dualism and free will utilizing quantum mechanics . Unsurprisingly it falls short and fails to deal with the seemingly intractable problem nicely elucidated by Schopenhauer as "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."

1 of 5 people found this review helpful

Serge Denizyaran

Edinburgh, UK

6/16/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Exceptionally good"

Beautiful explanation of differences of mind and matter. And still unproven hypothesis of mind controlling the brain plasticity.

0 of 3 people found this review helpful

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